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Bi the Way, it's Lois Shearing
3.8k Plays2 years ago
Continuing our UK-themed season, this week we sat down with Lois Shearing, a bi activist, freelance journalist and writer based in London. We chatted about their journey along the sexuality and gender spectrums, the many Bi+ groups they’ve been part of and helped organize (including the Bisexual Survivors’ Network, the London Bi Pandas, and an LGBT+ knitting club), and their popular writing about bisexuality that’s been published by The Independent, The Advocate, INTO, Openly, and more.
We then chatted about Lois’ book, “Bi The Way: The Bisexual Guide to Life”, which was published in 2021, highlighting topics such as being “really bi”, bisexuality as freedom, the bi v. pan “debate”, the challenges of coming out, how to find Bi+ community (and why it’s so important), and how sexuality and gender can be interrelated and interdependent. We also covered quite a few next-level Bi 2.0 topics, as I like to call them – check out the episode for some spicy takes!
Buy “Bi The Way: The Bisexual Guide to Life”: https://www.hachette.co.uk/titles/lois-shearing/bi-the-way/9781787752900/
Follow Lois on Twitter: https://twitter.com/LoShearing
Follow Lois in Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/loisfaith95/
Follow Lois on Medium: https://medium.com/@lois.shearing
Lois' Website: https://faithfullwords.wordpress.com/
“Why Bisexuality is a Threat to Terf Politics”: https://medium.com/@lois.shearing/why-bisexuality-is-a-threat-to-terf-politics-5f2b40563e11
Two Bi Guys is produced and edited by Rob Cohen
Created by Rob Cohen and Alex Boyd
Logo art by Kaitlin Weinman
Music by Ross Mintzer
We are supported by The Gotham
Made on Zencastr #MadeOnZencastr
Use my special link zen.ai/twobiguys1 and use twobiguys1 to save 30% off your first three months of Zencastr professional. #madeonzencastr
Try MagicMind and get 20% off your order or 40% off a subscription with promo code BIGUYS20: www.magicmind.co/biguys
This podcast is sponsored by BetterHelp. Visit betterhelp.com/twobiguys to get 10% off your first month.
We're going on a Bi+ trip to Maine in June 2023! Join the email list to get all the info: https://my.trovatrip.com/public/l/survey/rob-cohen
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Transcript
Introduction to Lois Shearing
00:00:00
Speaker
🎵
00:00:13
Speaker
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Two Bye, guys. We have another awesome interview for you today. My guest is a bi activist, freelance journalist, and writer based in London. We seem to be interviewing lots of writers based in London. There's a lot of bisexuality in London, I think.
00:00:30
Speaker
why it's one of my favorite cities. They are the founder of the Bisexual Survivors Network and the founder of the Do Better, Buy Us campaign, which aims to challenge biphobia. Their
Lois' Work and Influence
00:00:41
Speaker
writing on bisexuality has been published by The Independent, The Advocate, Diva Magazine, Gay Star News, Into, Openly, and much more. They created and hosted the YouTube series, The Ambisaders, along with former Two Buy Guys guest, Vanit Mehta.
00:00:58
Speaker
And their first book is called By the Way, the Bisexual Guide to Life. It was published in 2021 by Jessica Kingsley Publishers, and it's great. I just took a look at it. Please welcome to Two Bye Guys, Lois Shearing, finally. Hello, Lois. Hi. Yes, thank you so much for having me. I have been super excited to come on the show for a really long time. So thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to be chatting. And London is a really bisexual city.
00:01:27
Speaker
We have like quite a thriving bi scene here I think. I'm always yeah really excited to like get to talk to people about London's bi community and my book is actually dedicated to the bi community in London who as I say in the front of my book kind of took me under their wing when I was a little 21 year old when I first arrived in this city and had
00:01:53
Speaker
No friends, no idea what I was doing, found this amazing bi community, found these amazing bi activists who just kind of like, took in this probably little wide eyed country bumpkin who
Community Building and Activism
00:02:06
Speaker
looked terrified and sort of, you know, showed me the ropes a little bit.
00:02:11
Speaker
cool. That's awesome. I actually studied abroad in college in London, loved it. It became one of my favorite cities, but I wasn't out for so long and then finally got to come back a couple times after coming out before COVID and really got to explore the queer scene. And yeah, it's
00:02:30
Speaker
It's thriving. I haven't so much met the buy scene in London because of COVID, but hopefully I will soon. And I also neglected to read in your intro that you run a sewing and crafting group for queer people in London. Maybe not still, but did you used to do that?
00:02:49
Speaker
I did use to, it's still going as far as I'm aware. I think one of the other co-hosts is still running it. They still run it mainly on Discord, I think. I think it's mostly just Discord server now. But yeah, that was kind of like one of the first kind of by organizing things I did was set up this like sewing circle. It's called Stitch by Stitch. The by is obviously BI.
00:03:15
Speaker
And yeah, we used to meet monthly in the South Bank Centre and do do some sewing together. It was really fun.
00:03:24
Speaker
That's awesome. I love sewing and knitting. I also do some knitting at home when I have time. Have you ever done any bi-activism without a bi-pun in the title? Oh, that's such a good question. For me, actually, who you just mentioned, whenever we organize stuff together, he always says, like, I'm going to leave the name of the event to you because you're going to think of, like,
00:03:48
Speaker
some kind of pun to go with it and I'm always like stop putting this on me and then I'll text him half an hour later and be like we should call it this and he's like yes!
Gender Identity and Fluidity
00:03:57
Speaker
Hey, when you found the perfect bi pun, you got to use it. It's my talent. Yes, it's an ability that many bi people share, I think. Cool. Well, welcome. Great to have you. I want to get into your book and all the topics in the book and the activism you're doing.
00:04:18
Speaker
But as we always do, let's start with you. What pronouns do you use? How do you like to identify what labels do you use? And then we'll talk a little bit about the journey to get there.
Coming Out and Societal Pressures
00:04:30
Speaker
Cool. Yeah. So, uh, normally my pronouns are they, she go through a little bit of a, they then phase at the moment, which I sometimes go through.
00:04:40
Speaker
And then sometimes I'll go back through like a just a she phase, sometimes I'll go through an all pronouns phase. As I'm sure we'll cover in this book, I'm very, I'm a big fan of like phases. Sorry, I said in this book, I meant in this podcast, as I'm sure we'll cover in this podcast, I'm a big fan of phases. Cool. So I identify as a gender queer woman.
00:05:05
Speaker
But I also sometimes just use bisexual as my gender identifier as well. And I have a lot of have a lot of thoughts about bisexuality is gender that we could maybe talk about later. Interesting. But yeah, so I kind of use bisexual as my whole label. I've been identifying this way since I was about 14 and now in my late 20s, so it's really just stuck.
00:05:29
Speaker
Oh, okay, I definitely want to come back to that quickly because I'm fascinated by bisexuality and gender. Okay, but we got to get there. Tell us about when you were 14 and how did you realize it? What was that evolution like? When did you start using those terms and coming out?
00:05:51
Speaker
So I wish I could remember like what my awakening was like when I was in my early teens. I remember I'm someone who like I've always been bisexual and I've always known on some level that I was attracted to people of any gender. But I went to a
00:06:09
Speaker
Church of England primary school. And I have this really distinct memory of when we had sex education, we then had a vicar come in and tell us that sex was only between a man and a woman who were married. And I very distinctly remember having this memory of being like, oh, you're like, I'm only allowed to be attracted to men. And so everyone else is just attracted to like,
00:06:34
Speaker
you know, the opposite gender, I must be the only one who feels this way. And so I'm just going to tuck that information away and like not, not ever think about it anymore. And then when I got into secondary school, I did come out quite young, I came out in like year nine, which is about 14. So I don't really know the equivalent in America, maybe like middle school. And
00:06:59
Speaker
And I wish I could remember like how I got from tucking away that information to then like being like, yes, I'm bisexual. I think it was quite a long journey which involved my
00:07:12
Speaker
art teacher in year seven, who was a woman, and I was not into art, I'm really bad at art, but I was like, I just want to be so good at art, I just love art, and I want my teacher to like me so much, and I was like, can't work out why, and now I look back and I'm like, oh, I had a crash on my art teacher.
00:07:32
Speaker
And then like a lot of people who came out as queer in like the early 2000s, I think it involved a lot of typing like two girls kissing into YouTube very late at night. Like eventually, yeah, I kind of came out about 14. I was like in very much deep in like the emo subculture. And so I think that made it easier for me to come out at the age I did because like,
00:07:58
Speaker
email as a subculture was very bisexual. And so like a lot of my friends were also identifying that way. And like, some of them still do some of them went on to identify straight, some of them went on to identify as gay, I stayed with bisexual.
Fluidity of Bisexuality and Gender
00:08:14
Speaker
So yeah, that's kind of how I got to that point.
00:08:18
Speaker
cool. Okay, and then so I guess now tell me I'm curious about bisexuality as a gender. And I guess like, how did your conception of your sexuality and or gender change from, you know, you realized it, you started coming out, and then to now, how has it evolved?
00:08:39
Speaker
It's quite hard to conceptualize bisexuality as gender. It's something I've only really been thinking about in the last year or so. And it's kind of like my sexuality is very fluid. And for me, the word that best describes that is bisexual. And my gender is also very fluid. And so I use gender fluid to kind of sum that up. But I also don't think I can separate my bisexuality from my gender fluidness and my gender fluidness from my bisexuality. I think the two are very interlinked.
00:09:09
Speaker
And I think as well, like in my book, I think I described myself as a bit of like a gender chameleon that I often find myself, and this probably has a lot to do with like neurodivergency as well. I often find myself like mirroring the like gender expression of the people that I'm into. And so that's kind of like how I have come to this idea of like bisexuality as gender and the way that I relate
00:09:34
Speaker
to kind of the people that I'm dating is often through this lens of bisexuality and I consider my own gender like through that lens when I'm relating to them and I was just very inspired by I have some friends who kind of talk about their their gender identity as being lesbian because obviously like queer women have a different understanding of womanhood to straight women because in our very like patriarchal society womanhood is often
00:10:03
Speaker
dictated in relation to men. Whereas if you're a lesbian and you've chosen to completely opt out of existing in relation to men, obviously your conceptualisation of womanhood changes as well.
00:10:17
Speaker
And I, I feel that way as well, that like my womanhood in its relationship to both like patriarchy and to men is influenced by my bisexuality. But also I just find a lot of power in that. Like I know a lot of people who just use queers, their gender identity, as well as their sexuality, or who use like lesbian or dyke is just like their gender identity. Um, and it just felt like it made sense for me as well that like bisexual is such an important term for me that it just kind of encompasses my gender as well.
00:10:48
Speaker
That's really interesting. We haven't really talked about it in this way on this show yet, but it makes so much sense because I do think that sexuality and gender are very tied together, especially as gender gets more fluid, especially within one person. Then it's almost like that necessarily affects your sexuality because the sexuality is about your gender and potential genders of
00:11:15
Speaker
other people. So I identify as a man. I've had thoughts like, am I non-binary or gender? Maybe I'm a little gender fluid, but I don't feel like I'm non-binary. I feel like a cis man, but I do feel like bisexual is related to my gender. Like I'm a bisexual man and it's different than before. And I do feel like my masculinity is different than a straight man. So I like that. That's interesting.
Non-Binary Identity and Societal Challenges
00:11:45
Speaker
And I do feel like, I mean, something that's like a very biphobic notion of bisexuality is this idea that it like destabilizes gender because it kind of blurs the lines between like
00:11:59
Speaker
male and female if we pretend those are the only two genders. It blurs like distinction by finding men and women similar enough to be attracted to both of them. And so I think like once you have started to like blur that distinction in your sexuality, it also becomes quite hard
00:12:16
Speaker
to keep them very rigidly separate within your own gender identity. And so I think for me, like being bisexual and being able to relate to people of different genders in all the different ways that bisexuality has, has also made it much harder for me to be like, what is the box of women? What is the box of man? Why can't I just have a little bit of everything? We are greedy as bisexualism. I decided to just be all the genders as well.
00:12:43
Speaker
Right. Well, and it's also that thing of like, when I'm attracted to someone, it's a little bit of like, I want to be with that person, but I also kind of want to be that person. And like, oh, if something is interesting or attractive to me, I'm gonna start thinking about it for myself too. And so,
00:13:05
Speaker
you know, they've definitely affected each other. And I almost wish the term non-binary could be a sexuality. It's sort of more used as a gender term, but with all this Bi-Pan debates that all this
00:13:25
Speaker
sometimes I feel like it's nonsense going back and forth. Defining things is because we're all basically in the same umbrella. To me, the term non-binary as a sexuality is very broad and all-encompassing. It's anything other than straight, gay, lesbian. So I don't know. For sure. And I do know
Productivity Tips with Magic Mind
00:13:47
Speaker
the academic
00:13:48
Speaker
Meg John Barker has kind of used non binary in that way. And their book life isn't binary kind of talks about non binary sexualities to include kind of like bi pan queer, but also just going back to what you said about when we're attracted to people, you kind of start to
00:14:07
Speaker
emulate them a little bit. I think the scholar Lil Nas X sums it up quite well in his lyric, I want to fuck the ones I envy. That's a big gender mood as well, you know? Yes, exactly.
00:14:27
Speaker
Let's talk about productivity. I struggle with this. I have a million projects that I'm working on. I often feel overwhelmed, and yet I also find it difficult, especially working from home, to get to work for a full day, hour after hour, and to keep it going. I definitely burn out, especially if it's like writing or something creative.
00:14:47
Speaker
It's hard to stay in the zone. I need to take lots of breaks. I do use coffee to keep it going and to stay awake and to stay focused. But to be honest, the longer into the afternoon I'm having coffee, it doesn't feel so great. I get that jittery feeling. I get that acid reflux. I just don't feel great. So when I got this sample of Magic Mind, I was definitely skeptical at first. It's this tiny little shot. I didn't really think it could make that much of a difference.
00:15:15
Speaker
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Speaker
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Speaker
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Transition to Writing on Bisexuality
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Speaker
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00:17:08
Speaker
So your writing is everywhere. Your writing about bisexuality, it's all over. And looking at the list of topics you covered, it's vast. And you've been doing it for a few years now. So I'm curious how you got started writing queer and bi content. Was that your goal, to be writing about queerness and bisexuality, or did you kind of fall into it and it grew naturally?
00:17:35
Speaker
I definitely fell into it. When I first started doing freelance journalism when I was, so I did journalism at university and I started freelancing in my third year and I was originally doing like rural affairs content because I'm a little country pumpkin. So I was writing about like equestrianism and farming and that kind of stuff.
00:17:54
Speaker
So if you go really far back on, if you Google my name and go really far back, you'll eventually find like a load of rural affairs stuff. It's quite funny. I did my dissertation at university on, this is such a wordy like title. It was how non-monosexual identities were represented in the news coverage of the UK same sex marriage law.
00:18:25
Speaker
We could do a whole podcast on that dissertation I think. It wasn't good. So I did my dissertation on that and that was kind of how I first started reading academically about bisexuality. I had been like very heavily involved in like bi-tumbler for like a lot of my teens. So then for my dissertation I started reading all of this academic work that was out there about bisexuality and it just like resonated with me so deeply.
00:18:53
Speaker
Just like the scholarly stuff about bisexuality just seemed to align so well with my just general politics. And so I started writing for a little blog called The Queerness, which is amazing and everyone should check out. Just literally my just like, I think this is a bisexual thing. And then it just kind of escalated from there really. And I just, you know, kept thinking about it, kept writing about it. Just, I could not be shut up basically.
00:19:21
Speaker
Great. Perfect. How do you juggle writing for so many different mediums and platforms? Is that your full-time job or is it a side gig or how do you look at it? At the moment, it's a side gig. I have a full-time job as a content writer for an education agency. It eventually might be quite nice for it to be my full-time gig. But yeah, at the moment, I'm just freelancing a lot and I just
00:19:47
Speaker
pitch anywhere, basically, and just hope somewhere picks it up. And quite a few places have picked up a lot of what I've written about bisexuality, so that's really great. Yeah, you were slightly ahead of the curve of there has been an explosion lately, but it's very recent. Has your writing on this subject changed over time? When you look back at what you wrote a few years ago versus the things you're thinking about now, how has it evolved?
00:20:18
Speaker
I think it's less apologetic. And what I mean by that is I think I used to really write from a place of like, by people who do exist and we do have issues, please listen to us. Whereas now I write from a place of like, these are the things that mattered to like, by people into our community. This is what we need to be doing. Or this is what I think we need to be doing.
00:20:40
Speaker
But also like, I feel like I've just kind of, I mean, you describe it as like by 2.0 topics. I feel like I've kind of moved past the writing of like five issues that affect the bi community or like things not to say to a bi girl. Not that those articles aren't important. And now I sometimes get approached to like give quotes for them and I always really enjoy that.
00:21:00
Speaker
bi much prefer writing about things like bisexuality as gender or how would we better conceptualize queerness if we stopped pretending that bi people were always riding on the coattails of queer culture and acknowledge that like a lot of bi celebrities build queer culture. Cool. That's awesome. So I think that's what I mean by less apologetic.
00:21:24
Speaker
Yeah, that makes sense. I feel like when I started talking about this stuff too, that it was almost defensive in a way at first, because I had felt so much shame and stigma and being told it wasn't real, that the first kind of
00:21:43
Speaker
push was like, it is real, and it's valid, and it's okay. And like, we kind of did that a lot, season one of this podcast. And then we kind of moved beyond that. You have to kind of work through the like, I kind of think of it as like societal gaslighting almost, that you're saying like, this is a thing that I'm experiencing and living and
00:22:07
Speaker
everything around you is saying no, it isn't.
Publishing Journey and Book Creation
00:22:09
Speaker
You're wrong about that. And you have to kind of get to a place where you can just kind of trust your own experiences and say like, okay, I'm just taking the fact that this is real, and this is who I am, and this matters as a baseline, and we're going to go from there.
00:22:23
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. Well, and I think most bi people go through a similar evolution. And so when I go back and listen to some of Season 1 of this podcast, I'm like, Oh God, I sound different. I'm not talking about it the same way. I'm a little defensive and
00:22:42
Speaker
but that's why I don't go back and listen much. But I do think it's valuable for people who are new to this and looking for stuff for the first time to read an article about bisexual people exist or here are five things that are biphobic. That is important for the newbies. But if you're listening to season five of Two Bye Guys, we can get into 2.0 stuff. Yeah.
00:23:12
Speaker
I'm curious, you've written about being diagnosed as dyslexic. How has that affected your work as a professional writer? How do you overcome that challenge?
00:23:24
Speaker
Yeah, it's affected my work as a professional writer in my day job several times. I think I mentioned in the intro to my book that I had to midway through writing it. I experienced workplace discrimination because of my dyslexia and had to leave my job, and that was the second time that that had happened to me.
00:23:44
Speaker
But JKP were amazing. Like when I had my first meeting with Andrew, who was my editor at the time, one of my questions to him was like, I'm dyslexic. How would like, I'm worried that I'm going to turn something into you and you're going to be like, this is unreadable. And he was like, A, that's not going to happen because I've already like read a lot of your content. And B,
00:24:05
Speaker
They actually, they do a lot of work on a lot of books on neurodivergency. And so they'd already worked with dyslexic writers, and they had editors who knew how to work with dyslexic writers. I mean, one of my favorite notes that I got back all throughout the book was like, every time I'd spelled bisexual wrong, they had to highlight it and be like, are you referring to something else here? And I just had to like, put down this blanket thing of like, no, it's just a lot of vowels in the word bisexual, and they move around for me.
00:24:37
Speaker
So right now I'm writing a book about fascism and I keep spelling the word fascism wrong. So that's fun as well. But yeah, for the book, being dyslexic obviously does affect my writing career quite a lot. But luckily not with JKP. So I'm really grateful for that. It was really great like first experience.
00:24:55
Speaker
Awesome, cool. Well, so that leads right into it. So let's get into the book. And before we do talk about the topics in it, I'm curious about Jessica Kingsley, publishers, and how did you decide you wanted to write this book? How did you go about pitching and selling it? Tell us about that process because I'm in the middle of a similar process. Okay, cool. I'm picking your brain here a little.
00:25:20
Speaker
Okay, so you're gonna not like my answer then. So I had always like, I've been writing a lot about bisexuality and I knew that like down the line, I would want to write a book about it. I'd thought about maybe doing a book of essays, but I had actually written a children's book, a queer children's book that I was pitching around. And someone I know who's also published with JKP, their book is called Ace to Z.
00:25:48
Speaker
and it's like a dictionary of like queer terms. They suggested that I pitch it at JKP and they helped me like go through that process of pitching it and then again Andrew got in touch with me and said that they weren't interested in children's books at the moment but they were doing a series on LGBT issues for the teen market
00:26:10
Speaker
And they were looking for someone to write the B section and that they'd seen my portfolio. And would I be interested in writing a book for teenagers about bisexuality instead? And I said, yes.
00:26:21
Speaker
I would love to do that. Amazing. Yeah. And originally I went in with this like really, this is no shade to Andrew. I love Andrew if he's ever listened to this, but I went in with these really like dense notes about, I was like, I want to write a book about biphobia specifically and kind of mechanisms of biphobia and how it works. And I opened my notes and I said, okay, so as you know, bi people often feel discriminated against by both gay and straight people.
00:26:49
Speaker
And Andrew said, Oh, really, I didn't know that. And then I like shut my notes. And I was like, Okay, this is actually the book I'm gonna write for you. And kind of pitched the like the FAQ thing that it turned out being.
00:27:03
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I understand that and I think there's room in the world for a book about biphobia. I'd love to read it, but it makes sense. Sometimes we forget that there is a lack of baseline knowledge about bisexuality.
00:27:20
Speaker
from most of the world. I'm in a bi bubble sometimes and then you meet a regular person. They don't even know that, right? And so your book is really a great primer on all the most important foundational things about bisexuality.
00:27:45
Speaker
This episode of Two Bye Guys is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at BetterHelp.com slash Two Bye Guys and get on your way to being your best self. You know, when I was starting to realize I was by and starting to come out, I kind of wished there was a user manual for this experience. Thankfully, these days there are more and more books being published, but
00:28:06
Speaker
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00:28:30
Speaker
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00:28:55
Speaker
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00:29:49
Speaker
So let's talk about those things. A lot of it is stuff we've talked about on this show, and there's lots of great basics. Here, wait, let me read some of the chapter headings if I can find it just to give people an idea. Am I bi? What if I have a preference? Does bisexuality reinforce the gender binary? When should I come out?
00:30:10
Speaker
What's it like dating for bi people? Okay, so all great stuff and everyone can find all the answers to those questions in the book, except for am I bi as you write. You can't answer that for people. But if they read the book, they'll have a better idea.
00:30:27
Speaker
Okay, but I read it and I honed in on some sort of things I thought were really interesting and thought-provoking, some 2.0 stuff. So the first thing was this concept of being really by. Are you really by? And I'm going to read something you wrote because I just thought it was a great sort of intro to this.
00:30:50
Speaker
You wrote lots of people, even if they've been out as bi for years, like me, still often find themselves questioning whether they are really bi or bi enough. In my 11 years of being out and interacting with the bi community, I found that this is probably the most unifying bi experience. The world around us isn't great at recognizing or celebrating bisexuality. Every bi person I know
00:31:11
Speaker
been asked at some point in their lives if they're sure they're not actually gay or actually straight based on their dating history, normally more than once. I've heard that so often in my own life, but I hadn't heard it talked about as the most unifying by experience, but I think it may be. Can you just talk about your experience with that and why you wrote that?
00:31:37
Speaker
I really don't think I've ever met a bi person who something we haven't connected over or talked about is just like
00:31:44
Speaker
that question like it just comes up all the time like are you really bi are you sure you're not this are you sure you're not that and like so much of our discourse as a community is also about feeling bi enough or like not feeling like we're queer enough and like that has to come from somewhere like that that can't be all of us sharing the same like insecurity like it comes from the culture around us that says actually you'll settle down with one or the other or you'll realize this along the way so yeah i do think that's one of the most like
00:32:14
Speaker
unifying by experiences is that constantly having to like reassert yourself and come out again and assure people like, yes, you're sure. And so, yeah, that's kind of why I think it's like, something that connects all of us and brings us all together is this constant like, having to really push about our identity.
00:32:35
Speaker
I totally agree. And I think as you wrote, it also highlights just how binary the culture we live in is and just how uncomfortable most people are with the concept of fluidity because it is difficult to categorize and we like to categorize things. And so that's why I think most bi people have heard those things and feel that pressure.
00:33:03
Speaker
Yeah, I think my most like salient example of it happening to me was, when I was a teenager, I dated a man for five years. And then immediately after that, in my early 20s, I dated someone who, at the time identified as a woman for like four and a half years. So I was nearly perfectly 5050 in my early dating experience. And like still, like immediately after that, people would hear this and be like, yeah, but like,
00:33:28
Speaker
which one do you prefer? Or like, which way you really you know, it's like, I've nearly reached like the by equilibrium that we're supposed to all strive for.
Freedom in Bisexual Identity
00:33:37
Speaker
And yet you're still asking me this question.
00:33:40
Speaker
Yeah. That's wild because, yes, people always think it's this 50-50, and so then it's like even when you're there. Even if you do it, it's not enough. So it's really not about that. It's really about some sort of discomfort with duality or something. Actually, I'm jumping two questions down. This was literally my question was, why do you think so many non-bi people have trouble understanding that
00:34:08
Speaker
it doesn't have to be a 50-50 split. We can still have preferences and experience attraction differently over time or fluidity. Why do you think people have such trouble with that?
00:34:20
Speaker
I don't know if you can really answer for all the other people out there, but. I think people love to be able to categorize things. And I think it's like a survival tactic. I think I talked about this a bit in the beginning of my book, but like, it has been a very useful survival tactic to be able to say like, Hmm, that thing is orange and stripey.
00:34:39
Speaker
I don't have enough time to also see if it has like big paws and big teeth, I'm just going to run away because it's a tiger. And so I still think that is like this slight impulse to need to like categorize things. And that's why we end up with a lot of like, the internal biases that we have not just towards like queer people, but towards like, people of color and disabled people and all of these kind of things.
00:35:01
Speaker
And I do think yeah, particularly for bi people, we do kind of elude that conceptualization a little bit. And again, we make it harder for like people to ascertain like their straight privilege. Because as I, as I always say this person's name wrong, it's Yoshino, who wrote the epistemic contract of bisexual erasure.
00:35:24
Speaker
talks about how if you see a man who talks about how much he loves his wife, but then you find out he's also sleeping with Ben, then, you know, you could have accidentally given straight privilege to someone who doesn't deserve it. And that's very threatening to our culture. So I think a lot of it comes from like the threat that we as bi people pose to like heterosexual patriarchal ideals that
00:35:49
Speaker
a man will love a woman and only a woman, and that makes him a real man. And so I think that's why people are so uncomfortable by people crossing over these boundaries that we're not supposed to. CB That's really interesting and it makes sense. Yeah, it is like dismantling these pillars of patriarchy. You also write in the book about bisexuality as freedom. Can you explain what that means to you?
00:36:16
Speaker
Yeah, so that's a Juno Jordan quote. She was an amazing poet who wrote a lot about bisexuality. I think that's mine. And I know it's several other people's like favorite quote about bisexuality. For me, it just kind of, yeah, it means like not having to choose. It means having like, more options. I know that like, the respectable thing that bi people are meant to say is like, oh, well, we don't really have more options. And like, it's just as hard dating. And that is true.
00:36:42
Speaker
But I do also enjoy having I think I don't know if I talked about this in the book or if I just talked about it somewhere else But like one of my favorite places to be bisexual is on the tube here in London I love getting on the tube and being like she's cute. He's hot Like it's fun. It's freedom. It's like possibilities. It's I
00:37:07
Speaker
not having to put myself in boxes that I don't want to put myself in. It's like not having to ignore these like borders that have been put around my identity by other people. So I think that's what I like about the phrase bisexuality is freedom.
00:37:23
Speaker
I love it too. I love that freedom to choose. And we get that biphobia of like, why can't bi people just decide and make a choice? And it's like, I make lots of choices. That's what I like, is making lots of choices, not just one choice to live with for the rest of my life, but continuing to see where I'm at and what I
00:37:44
Speaker
want and making a new choice today that I didn't make yesterday. It's very freeing and you don't get locked in. Cool. Okay, I really liked this chapter or topic about essentialism and as we're talking about like
00:38:03
Speaker
choices and choosing. So you write about how biphobia and transphobia can grow from essentialism, which is this idea that our identity is innate rather than a choice. And you write that the born-this-way narrative, which is kind of what I grew up hearing about in terms of gay and lesbian people, that it's left a lot of queer people out in the cold. So I'm curious, how do you view this conflict between
00:38:29
Speaker
the innateness of our identity versus choosing. Because I think it is complicated for bi people. Feelings are not a choice, but sort of coming out is more active of a choice, or transitioning is a more active thing you have to choose. It doesn't just happen. So how do you view that?
00:38:50
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I might use the other F word here again, because I've been writing and thinking about fascism a lot recently. And I think essentialism ties really closely to fascism. And so I've been
00:39:03
Speaker
thinking a lot about biphobia and fascism recently, which maybe isn't good. Sounds great to me. So the essentialist argument is that there is something innate within people that makes them the category that they are. And so it depends on the person making this argument. So for a lot of people, it's like a biological essentialism.
00:39:29
Speaker
So it's if you have certain genitalia or certain chromosomes, then you are a certain gender. And this is also where the like scientific hunt for like the gay gene has come from, that like there must be this unifying thing, this essence of the thing that all the people in that category share. And for other people, and again, I'm thinking about kind of fascism here, it's this like mystical essentialism of
00:39:59
Speaker
like this divine thing that makes someone a woman or a man or whatever. And so again, I think bi people evade that a little bit, because like there could be an essence that makes someone attracted to everyone or makes someone attracted to all genders. But it could also be that maybe there isn't an essence that unifies all men, that unifies all women, that unifies all non-binary people. And that
00:40:24
Speaker
once you can kind of see past the cultural boundaries around all of those identities.
00:40:32
Speaker
you realize that you're just interacting with people or other categories. And that's not to say that like gender isn't real or that sexuality isn't real, like it absolutely is. But also it's very like bound up in our culture. Like heterosexuality is a concept only started existing a couple of hundred years ago. And like bisexuality and homosexuality like gayness followed quite swiftly afterwards as concepts. But these things aren't like these
00:41:00
Speaker
divine ideals that we've always been aware of and they're different depending on like your cultural understanding of gender or your cultural understanding of romantic love.
00:41:09
Speaker
Absolutely. Let me jump in because I totally agree these categories that were brought up with are created by people. They're not real things. And I think when I started to view sexuality and gender as spectrums rather than distinct categories, that really conflicts with essentialism.
Societal Expectations and Sexual Autonomy
00:41:33
Speaker
Because if everyone is some dot on a big 3D spectrum, then
00:41:39
Speaker
then we're all in the same space. And then these groups, we draw circles around the dots to say, okay, these people are this thing and these people are this thing. That's all kind of invented, and that's a choice that our society has made for us. The spectrum is a spectrum.
00:41:59
Speaker
for sure. And then the way that kind of links into thinking about right wing concepts or like authoritarian concepts is that once you start creating these binary categories, or these very separate categories, we kind of then naturally start ranking them, we put men above women, we put straight people above queer people, we put able people above disabled people. And if you start removing the like essence of the thing that creates with categories, it becomes a lot a lot harder to rank them.
00:42:28
Speaker
Yeah. Oh, that makes so much sense. Exactly. So also in the book you wrote on this topic, you wrote, I want to read this because I loved it. Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying being queer is a choice. I'm saying, so what if it were? Why shouldn't we deserve to have our gender identities and sexualities respected even if we did choose them, which I agree with? And I also loved, you wrote,
00:42:51
Speaker
some of us don't feel like we were born the way we now identify and that our sexuality may change and develop even with our input as we grow. So, I mean, it's very well said there, but do you want to comment on that further? BT. Yeah, I think just, I mean, Heron Greensmith has done some really amazing writing on the Born This Way narrative and kind of its pros and limitations of, you know, it has been the way that, like,
00:43:18
Speaker
same-sex marriage and a lot of queer rights have been hard won, especially in the United States. But it also has this limit that we now are held to the standard that if we're not always this thing, if we don't always feel like we're this thing, if we don't feel like it's a core part of who we are or something that we were born with, then do we not deserve those same rights? Like if someone, their whole life, if a woman, their whole life has only loved men and has never even thought about loving women and then falls in love with a woman and thinks,
00:43:47
Speaker
maybe she's just the one off. Maybe I only love this woman. Does she not still deserve to marry her just because she doesn't necessarily now can consider herself a lesbian or bisexual or anything like that. And I do also think that like it gives us more autonomy to be able to say, actually, like, maybe I want to disengage with this part of this identity. And you know, lots of lots of people do make choices about how they express themselves or who they date or choose who they
00:44:14
Speaker
you currently choose who you fall in love with, but you can choose who you want to pursue.
Importance of Bi Visibility and Community
00:44:18
Speaker
And I mean, those people deserve rights and freedoms as well. So again, I think it's moving away from this slightly like right wing idea of you only deserve rights if you kind of can always prove you're this thing and where you fit within like the ranking of that thing. That is not a good scientific explanation. I love it. Thank you.
00:44:46
Speaker
Next topic, let's talk about coming out, the chapter on coming out. But I want to hone in on something specific. You wrote about when you first came out, it was to a friend, like a close friend, who then later, a few years later, came out to you as bye.
00:45:03
Speaker
that has happened to me so many times. Like of people I knew from my past who when I come out, they come out to me or when I come out a few years later, they come out to me as bi. Why do you think that's such a common experience for bi people?
00:45:21
Speaker
I don't know if it's just for bi people in particular, I guess, for me, like I live in quite a bi bubble. So that is more my experience. But I think like, yeah, once you have a friend who starts like living this way, and you start seeing the freedoms or like the authenticity that it offers them, it does become just so much easier for you to start like reflecting on
00:45:43
Speaker
your own thoughts and feelings. The old phrase, you can't be what you don't see. I think previously, even for my generation, and I'm not that old, even though people on Twitter keep calling me a bi-elder, I'm in my 20s. I'm like, you're much younger than me, so what does that make me? Even for people my age and in my generation who, things are a lot better for us and there was a lot more rip.
00:46:13
Speaker
representation, the like best representation we could hope for was like our friends coming out and living authentically. So I do just think it's that I think it's like once you start seeing people living comfortably in themselves, it becomes so much easier for you to reflect on that.
00:46:28
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. Well, and also on this topic of coming out, as we know, bi people are the most invisible, possibly in the queer community, we're the least likely to be out. And so that sort of perpetuates the cycle of invisibility and shame and not coming out. And so at a certain point, I felt like I have to come out, I have a responsibility
00:46:52
Speaker
But it took me a while to get to that point, and I thought I'd take it to the grave before that. So I'm curious, you came out pretty early, so I don't know how you felt about this at the time. But in addition to how you felt, how do you view that at a society level? Is it important for bi... How do you balance the importance of bi people coming out with the
00:47:20
Speaker
you know, it's okay to not come out and not pressuring people if they're not ready. And like, how do we balance that? Is it okay to not come out? That's such a good question of how do we balance it? Because I personally am like, you don't know anyone coming out. I have a friend, I don't know if she still is identifying this way, but she like would not label her sexuality at all. She was like, it's no one's business.
00:47:45
Speaker
I, if I fall in love with this person, then that's fine. If I fall in love with this person, it's fine. I'm not telling anyone, like even myself. And I was like, that's so rad. I love that. And like, I hope eventually we can all get to that place where like, it just doesn't matter anymore. But until then, I guess like the way of viewing it is that coming out lets you find community. Like, no two bi people's experiences are going to be the same. But I found that I have more in common with people who call themselves bi than like,
00:48:15
Speaker
People will call themselves straight or gay. Although obviously I have a lot more common with people who are gay. Just kind of naturally. And so I guess like the balancing act is.
00:48:27
Speaker
There's so many pros to coming out in terms of like mental health when you get to like live authentically and finding community and all that kind of stuff. But then obviously it's just like not possible for some people and no one owes us like they're coming out. I do think there's a lot of like political power in it of saying like I'm going to live as this person regardless of like what I might lose out on. But we can't really make that decision for anybody else. And I guess the best we can do is keep like fighting to create
00:48:57
Speaker
environment where it is easier to come out. You write in the book about seeing life and approaching relationships, quote, through bi-tinted glasses. So I'm wondering if you could explain what that means to you and do you feel like you're always wearing those glasses like all the time or do you ever get a chance to take them off or do you want to?
00:49:22
Speaker
I think I may have recently had just watched BoJack when I wrote that, and I don't know if you've watched BoJack. I have, but remind me. I don't remember. That's the really famous quote where Wanda, one of the ex-girlfriends of BoJack, talks about if you look at life through rose-tinted glasses and all of the red flags just look like blacks. I think I maybe had that analogy in my head while I was thinking about this, but I do think that my experience is bisexual.
00:49:52
Speaker
Internal life is bisexual. My internal desire is a bisexual. I can't look at the world in another way. I don't know what it's like to be straight. I don't know what it's like to be gay. I can't look at the world through those experiences.
00:50:06
Speaker
I guess if I was being really pretentious, this kind of goes back to like, the epistemic kind of argument and like philosophers that we can only explain, you can't ever prove that there's a world beyond your own perception. And you can get into some real good solipsism there if you also, like me happen to have a history of clinical depression. But like, I can't experience the world in any other way than as someone who is attracted to all genders.
00:50:33
Speaker
And so every time I have a relationship with someone, regardless of what their gender is, I'm bringing my experience as a multigender attracted person to that relationship. Whether that relationship is like a friendship or romantic or just a sexual relationship. I can't like bring any other experiences to it because I don't have those experiences. So I think in terms of like, do I ever take off my bi-tenter glasses? I don't really know if I can. I think they're just embedded in there.
00:51:02
Speaker
But also, I like viewing the world in that way. It opens up more possibilities. It opens up my politics as like an anarchist person to look at the world in a way that's not about borders and binaries. Man, I really did give tensions with that answer.
00:51:19
Speaker
I love that answer. I mean, that's kind of what I was thinking too of these glasses. I put them on because of how I see gender and relationships and sexuality, but I still wear them when I look at other things now in my life and my politics and other issues that are seemingly unrelated, but you look at the world in a less binary way, I feel. So that's why I identified with that a lot.
00:51:46
Speaker
you're right in the book about bi-community and why it's important. So I want to ask about your experience of finding bi-community in London. How did it affect you? And then is that connected to your activist work? How did you get involved in the bi-activism you're involved in?
00:52:06
Speaker
Yeah, so the answer to both those questions is an event called Bifest that up until the pandemic was happening annually in South London and it was just like a one-day bi-festival in, what do they call it, a Quaker church?
00:52:23
Speaker
And it was just kind of a day of like workshops and talks and kind of roundtables and stools and picnics. If it's still going and anyone's like local, I highly recommend it. I think it's been on pause since COVID started. But I went to those like a couple of times when I first moved to London and
00:52:44
Speaker
just loved it, like met so many cool people. And I went to a workshop that Marcus who runs the bisexual index here in the UK was running called how to be a bi activist. And we did that workshop and then at the end of the workshop, we were kind of doing this skills exchange thing where I was like, right, if you have this skill and you want to connect with someone else who wants to do something, then like now's the chance. And I kind of put forward that like I was interested in writing
00:53:11
Speaker
And I wanted to maybe write for some bi websites. And then Libby, who runs Biscuit, which is a bi advocacy group here in the UK, kind of like grabbed me and was like, yes, you're coming to write for me. And then that was like five, six years ago. And I've done like the majority of my organizing since then with Marcus and Libby. And through them,
00:53:31
Speaker
Yeah, I like found so much more of like the bi community and got involved in loads of different groups. They used to be a group in London called London Bi Pandas, which was a direct action group. They were amazing. Shout out to Fox who like started that and read it. And yeah, that's just kind of how I've, how I got involved. I got involved in activism like before I got involved in community stuff. Interesting. I've been doing like a lot of organizing since the beginning. And now I feel like I found
00:53:57
Speaker
communities that are less about activism and are more about coming out.
Challenges within the LGBTQ+ Movement
00:54:02
Speaker
He's just chilling. Cool. And sewing and knitting. I feel like sometimes in many respects by activists, we end up fighting for sort of basic rights and equal resources and sort of
00:54:18
Speaker
basic level awareness. Why do you think it's so challenging to get that basic level of resources for bi people specifically? And what do you think is the next level of bi activism? How do you hope to see the movement grow?
00:54:38
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I think I could do like another hour of just talking at you about how like mainstream LGBT organizations have like failed by people pretty badly. And are often very happy to take their money but don't want to give it back to our community. But I won't get too deep into that because that's very negative. But um,
00:55:01
Speaker
Yeah, I feel like we just end up fighting for basic stuff because of like the biracial that not only are there not that many bi people but that like our experiences are actually just like watered down 50% gay experiences and that we don't have any of that own
00:55:16
Speaker
issues that we only kind of experience like 50% homophobia or like 50% of the homelessness that gay people face, which actually makes me think of a really good essay in the book by politics, queries, theories and visions, which I can see on my shelf over there.
00:55:33
Speaker
which is called, if half of you dodges a bullet, all of you dies. And it's about like, if you get shot on one side of you, it's not just half your body that dies, it's all of it. Which like, if you get hit in the, if we even individualize
00:55:48
Speaker
why people is like half gay, half straight, which we're not. If someone homophobically attacks the half gay part of you, does the straight part get up and walk away? Like, no, it doesn't. And so I think that's kind of that misconception is why we're still fighting for like our issues to be taken seriously, because we're not seen as having any of our own separate issues of the community. I do think that's changing slightly. And I think it's because of the work of a lot of amazing bi activists who are fighting for stuff like
00:56:17
Speaker
better resources for homeless people, better domestic violence resources, which I obviously think is like one of the main issues facing bi people and all of that kind of stuff. So I do think it's changing. But yeah, I think it's very slow and a lot of the LGBT organizations. And again, I think you could even link this to the Born This Way narrative that bi people are seen as having the option to like choose out of the gay life that issues have just been taken less seriously and given less money.
00:56:45
Speaker
Right. It's like, oh, if you're buying, you can choose to not display your queerness, then you should be fine and we don't need to support you. When, in fact, that attitude causes even more mental distress for bi people because we're so caught in between. Just to add on to that, I also think if I can be a little bit spicy that
00:57:09
Speaker
by people are less palatable to a lot of the liberal donors to these organizations, because I think in a lot of, and I think this is a very American thing, if you don't mind me saying. I think a lot of these American orgs, which dictate a lot of the general Western conceptualization of queerness,
00:57:31
Speaker
that like gay people are this kind of like unfortunate desexualized other whereas like bi people we're seen as unfortunate but we're a lot less harder to desexualize because we're seen as like greedy. Hypersexualized sometimes. Yeah for sure definitely and so I think the charity sector particularly in America has like taken a lot of the like fangs out of
00:57:57
Speaker
the politicalness of being gay, because they've just kind of said like, they're just one step removed from straight people, because they just so happen to, you know, only like men or only like women or whatever. And they can be made more palatable, which obviously is not true of gay people, gay people are like very political and very rebellious to like, the hetero patriarchy, whereas gay by people's issues, it's a lot harder to make us palatable to straight liberal allies.
Bi Survivors Network and Intersectionality
00:58:27
Speaker
Yep. That's my slightly spicy taste. Very spicy. I love it. Can you tell us about the Buy Survivors Network and why you created that and what it is and how it's helping people?
00:58:45
Speaker
Yeah, so the bi survivors network is a support group and an awareness campaign, I guess, organizing around the fact that bi people face much higher rates of sexual and domestic violence than gay or straight people. So for bi women, statistic is like two in three bi women are survivors, but by men, it's something like 50%. And this is like way higher than it is for gay or straight people that aren't really statistics about non binary.
00:59:10
Speaker
by people, I would really like it if there were some. So yeah, we run a chat which happens on Telegram every other week and we also do awareness and like community outreach, we go to Pride and stuff like that. And so I started that in my very early 20s after I got out of an abusive relationship in which I felt like my bisexuality had played a role in some of the
00:59:40
Speaker
things that I had experienced in that relationship and I felt like a lot of the support groups for sexual violence didn't know how to deal with bi people. The mainstream support groups weren't very good on dealing with queer people in general and the queer support groups didn't really know how to deal with bi people, particularly bi people who had been in
01:00:00
Speaker
like different gender relationships with experienced abuse, but were still queer and still felt that their queerness had contributed to that, which now having run BSN for five years is like a very common experience I've found among people who reach out to us. So yeah, that's what the Biasurvivors Network is. I'm hoping to at some point be able to like produce some reports and stuff and get some more information about Biasurvivors experiences, but it's so going. If anyone wants to volunteer, please DM me on Twitter.
01:00:30
Speaker
cool. We'll put some info in the show notes. I'm curious just to follow up, when people say their bisexuality may have been related to abuse or bad things in a relationship, do you have examples of how that could manifest? For sure, yeah. We actually have just produced a leaflet that has some red flags that discusses this of things to look out for in a relationship and includes lots of bi people on Twitter kind of answered this callout that I put out about that.
01:00:59
Speaker
And a lot of it is to do with the stereotypes as bi people as cheaters, bi people as like promiscuous, especially bi women, and especially bi people of color who are really hypersexualized and are seen as like always wanting it. That kind of contributes to the fetishization that like bi people don't say no, or that like it's okay to like, bi people are exotic and always consenting and that kind of stuff. So that can really contribute to like rates of sexual violence,
01:01:29
Speaker
And within intimate partner relationships, it could be something like a partner saying to you, well, you can't go out with any of your friends because I can't trust you around men or women, or like I need to look through your phone because you're bi, you're more likely to cheat on me. Like these are kind of just the ways in which like biphobia manifests within like intimate relationships and can turn sour really quickly.
01:01:54
Speaker
Yep. Cool. Thank you for sharing that. Okay, final thought. We'll end where we started. So we started with sort of talking about how your sexuality and gender identity are kind of interrelated. In the activism space, I think that's an important concept too. Like, how do you see the bisexual community and the trans non-binary communities being interrelated if they are? And like,
01:02:22
Speaker
why do you think it's important for the bi community to stand in solidarity with the trans and non-binary communities and vice versa? For sure, yeah. Firstly, I think just we need to stand in solidarity with all queer people. The people attacking us do not see the difference in us in the way that we do. They see us all as queer. It doesn't matter to them whether we're gay, straight, so gay, bi, trans, ace, we are queer to them.
01:02:52
Speaker
And so if we don't like fight together, then we're fucked basically. But also I think specifically the overlap of like bi and trans communities, I think there's always been like a very rich history of solidarity and community between us. If you look at the statistics and like the majority of trans people identify as like bi or pan or something like that. And also within the bi communities, we have kind of like much higher rates of
01:03:22
Speaker
non-cisness than perhaps gay communities do or like gay people do. And so I also think it comes back to this essentialism thing that we've talked about quite a lot that the main arguments about biphobia are very similar to the main arguments about transphobia.
01:03:38
Speaker
And it's about going against what's being seen as your like essence as a man or a woman. I actually wrote an essay on this, which you can find on my medium, which is called bisexuality and the fret turf politics, which talks about the the essentialism overlap, and how it's kind of still the same fight of destabilizing gender and destabilizing patriarchy and the way in which kind of gender upholds patriarchy.
01:04:04
Speaker
that is very much why we're seeing like this backlash mainly against trans people, particularly here in the UK, it's really scary right now.
Conclusion and Gratitude
01:04:12
Speaker
And eventually it will come for all queer people. But the arguments against like trans and bi people are very, very similar.
01:04:20
Speaker
Yeah, that was the exact article I had been reading that I was referencing. And so if you want to check out that article, we will put it in the show notes along with lots of other of Lo's writing and the link to the book. You can buy the book, by the way.
01:04:38
Speaker
and we'll put lots of other stuff in there. And that's, I think that'll do it for us today. We've covered almost all the topics I wanted to, and it's been a lovely, fascinating, by 2.0 discussion. So thank you so much for being here, Lo. Oh my God, thank you so much for having me on. I love talking about bi-politics, and I'm talking about deep fried bi-politics. I'll talk about it for hours. So thank you for inviting me on, just to do like my favorite thing, which is talk about bisexuality.
01:05:08
Speaker
Yay, I'm so glad. Me too. Thanks again, love. This was great. Thank you so much. Two Bye Guys is produced and edited by me, Rob Cohen, and it was created by me and Alex Boyd. Our logo art is by Caitlin Weinman. Our music is by Ross Mincer. We are supported by the Gotham, and we are part of the Zencaster Creator Network. Use promo code TwoByGuys to get 30% off your first three months of Zencaster. Thanks for listening to Two Bye Guys.